e-Con e-News

blog: eesrilanka.wordpress.com

‘Before you study the economics, study the economists!’

e-Con e-News 25-31 May 2025

*

‘In my own surveying parties I never permitted a native

to touch a theodolite or make an original computation,

on the principle that the triangulation or scientific work

was the prerogative of the highly paid Europeans.’

– Surveyor-General of India, quoted in SBD de Silva’s

The Political Economy of Underdevelopment, 1982

*

Sri Lanka is also the 2^nd largest market

for England’s ‘transnational education’ fraud!

They have directly benefited from the undermining

of Sri Lanka’s supposed free-education system

*

Allowing ‘the natives’ access into the technical aspects of European ‘culture & its scientific spirit would have undermined the monopoly of administrative, technological & scientific skills’, writes SBD de Silva. He describes instead, how in non-settler colonies like Sri Lanka, where ‘educational opportunities were much better than in the settler colonies’, ‘education was largely of a non-utilitarian nature, biased in favour of literary & academic attainments‘. Gratiaen Awards, anyone? Missed the shortlist by the short hairs, you say, old chap? Tut! Tut! A Maharajah Superstar, you may wannabe indeed!

     It wouldn’t matter. ‘Skills & technical know-how’ are made irrelevant by the particular role that colonies were expected to play in the world economy – as primary producers & markets for manufactured goods.

     The media in Sri Lanka constantly treats people to sermons about our lack of ‘marketable’ skills. They are happy to omit ‘the role played by the colonial state in stifling the overall propagation of skills, capabilities & industrial habits’. This continues to this day.

     SBD de Silva suggests it was the presence of a white working class in settler colonies that created pressures for advanced employment opportunities – their governments were compelled to recognize, that for political and social reasons ‘it could not countenance the existence of distress among unemployed white settlers’ living amidst a ‘native’ population.

     De Silva recounts in detail how, ‘Apart from the notorious ‘civilised labour’ policy, designed to exclusively benefit white workers, there was a conscious policy of industrial development through protective tariffs and state industrial monopolies. The fiscal protection given to domestic manufacturers had as its primary goal the promotion of regular employment.’ And no, the English never complained about paying them higher wages than the natives. And now we have US Vice President JD Vance calling for the prevention of Asian and African access to a modern industrial education. For SBD de Silva it was not the skill of settlers or their lack of peasant prejudices but their severance from metropolitan ties, which we have still been unable to accomplish (see ee Focus, Republic).

*

• An apparent expert on, and sympathizer of, terrorist acts, if not a planner of such terrorism himself, the Republic of Poland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Radosław Sikorski visited Sri Lanka’s President Anura Kumara Disanayake on May 29 afternoon, accompanied by EU Ambassador to Sri Lanka Carmen Moreno. The visit is purportedly due to Poland’s Presidency of the Council of the European Union,

     After ‘some mysterious someone’ blew up on 26 September 2022 the NordStream pipelines supplying Russian gas to Germany, this funny fellow Sikorski infamously tweeted with an aerial photo of gas billowing to the Baltic Sea surface with a simple Thank you, USA.” Hours later he followed up with a tweet that Ukraine & the Baltic states had opposed NordStream’s construction for 20 years. A few days further on, Poland cut off the Yamal-Europe pipeline which transits across Poland and was meant to supply large quantities of natural gas to Europe. Sikorski, considered a well-trained English agent & poodle, was accused of trying to divert from England’s role in the terrorist bombing of the pipeline, by blaming the USA alone. Then again, the USA is the grand conductor of the war on Russia through Ukraine, just as it is the frenzied baton-wielder of the Israeli genocide of Palestine. In a context of India hoping to build severable pipelines to Sri Lanka, and the white attempt to block off China from West Asia and Africa via the Indian Ocean as well, one wonders about the type of expertise Sikorski has to offer (other than putting his boot in his mouth!).

*

     The US attempt to assassinate Russia President V Putin on May 20 was silenced just as volubly, by the English media hailing ‘breakthroughs’ in peace talks over the NATO war on Ukraine. Such are the typical white tactics for those who know the history of the Americas – the treachery involved in the building of empire, ‘how the West was lost’, etc, let alone English subterfuge across the world. Not just English history, the kidnapping and murder of Haiti’s famous liberator Toussaint L’Overture took place after he was invited to talk peace on a French ship. This is the art of strategic ambiguity, of multiple messaging, so your enemies hear one thing, and your purported friends something else. The murder of Russian President VV Putin would then have been hailed as a bit of smart warfare, just like the murder of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, who had been also lured on the basis of peace talks.

*

Meanwhile, England’s Lord John Hannett of Everton, England’s Trade Envoy to Sri Lanka, is said to have avoided the Katunayake Free Trade Zone (FTZ), where the English company Next is trying to illegally sack almost 2,000 factory workers, while claiming the workers are too violent to directly negotiate with. Next was just recently listed as a success story of established English businesses in Sri Lanka, along with ‘HSBC, Standard Chartered, the London Stock Exchange Group, De La Rue Currency, Unilever, M&S, and Tesco’. Hannett’s diplomatic gang instead visited MAS Holdings’ Silueta facility in Biyagama. Meanwhile, Wijeya Group’s Financial Times columnist Ajith Perera accused the FTZ trade union of being in league with Next shareholders in London. England’s Next fiasco in Katunayake does indeed brings up curious workers’ issues: Why are the rag-trade unions in England, the EU & the US so interested in the right of garment workers in Sri Lanka, as opposed to their own workers? Also, do they fund unions here to break away from larger worker and political movements in the country? The complaint about the low productivity of the workers is also a joke, when England has never shown any interest in increasing productivity in such labour-intensive ventures in Sri Lanka. The plantations, where women have been plucking leaves with specific pectoral, deltoid and rotator cuff muscles, unenhanced by machinery, for the last 150 years at least, stand as a monument to English piffle about productivity.

     The English Trade Envoy’s inaugural visit to Sri Lanka was preceded by the arrest of a female English drug mule, offering a certain irony to the International Trade Centre (ITC), and Sri Lanka’s Export Development Board (EDB), and the envoy, launching their SheTrades Sri Lanka Hub webpage, under the English government-funded SheTrades Commonwealth project ‘to empower women-led businesses & integrate them into global trade’. Traders alright!

     The trade envoy also arrives with the typical threats and fake laments of being victims, such as: ‘Last year’s assault incident of travel-vlogger resurfaces’about some English social-media businessman getting beaten up for possibly intruding on local people’s private affairs, with the alleged assailant being arrested that very day. Sri Lanka is also the 2^nd largest market for England’s transnational education fraud! They have directly benefited from the destruction of Sri Lanka’s supposed free-education system. We will not be taught how England’s Pearson plc, now the biggest and most expensive publisher of educational texts and examinations in the ‘free’ world, is linked to the forces that sabotaged the attempts (by DJ Wimalasurendra, et al) to achieve energy security. As SBD de Silva said, it would have been better to give free fertilizer to cultivators than miseducating Colombo’s wannabes. Meanwhile, our accountants (certified in England and exported in droves). still don’t know how to count, for every news item about the envoy, claims, ‘Sri Lanka is a valuable trading partner for England, with bilateral trade worth approximately £1.6billion’. Never forgetting to add that ‘the trade balance is skewed in Sri Lanka’s favour with England as Sri Lanka’s 2^nd largest export market’. Exporting what? Natural materials that an industrial England then makes more profit off through processing & refining. English Tea indeed!

*

• So why has Sri Lanka’s May 22 Republic Day been increasingly ignored? From France to the USA to India – such days are cause for ritual celebrations. But not here. In this ee Focus Shiran Illanperuma spoke about this at a recent Communist Party of Sri Lanka celebration on May 22. He, however, does not refer to The Proposals for Conferring on Ceylon Fully Responsible Status within the British Commonwealth of Nations”, as authored by one chap named Herwald Ramsbotham, who as Chairman of the Soulbury Commission 1944-45 laid out the path for Ceylon to gain ‘Dominion Status’, granting it internal self-government within the ‘British Commonwealth’. 

     ‘Soulbury has come to bury your soul!‘, cried out Indian Marxist Bankim Mukherjee, to condemn the ‘bargain’ at a socialist rally on Galle Face Green. Mukherjee was the first member of the Communist Party of India to be elected to legislature. Yet what time-bombs did Ramsbotham plant, to keep Ceylon in check, after reigning as Governor-General of Ceylon, 1949-54, for this Baron to be promoted as a Viscount Soulbury in the County of Buckingham? What contracts and privileges did accrue?

     Illanperuma highlights how & why in 1948, our ‘political independence’ still stood incomplete, with our economic independence being slowly eroded, with a US citizen devising and installing the Central Bank of Ceylon in 1950, binding us to the IMF & World Bank’s prognoses. To fatten a compliant class, these forces promoted a culture of consumption, rather than an ethos of modern production. Even this so-called political independence was conditional on the English being allowed to keep their military here and control our foreign policy. The 11 November 1947 White Paper, ‘Proposals for conferring on Ceylon fully responsible status within the British Commonwealth Nations’, had the UK-Ceylon Defence Agreement as its first appendix, was signed by DS Senanayake. Two days later, on 13 Nov 1947, a Ceylon Independence Bill was rolled out before the English Parliament, and adopted. ‘1948 was a bargain struck by comprador rulers’ – indeed, Illanperuma then lists out the promises of the 1972 ‘Republican’ constitution, and notes the importance of modern production, of machines making machines. He even recalls Guinea-Bissau’s Amilcar Cabral who saw the link between industrialization & freedom. Midst the valorization & demonization of the armed forces, Illanperuma could have added Cabral’s famed bon mots, that ‘the duty of the man with the weapon is to protect the man with the tool’.

*

Throughout the country the belief prevailed that

the politicians of the metropolis deserved no respect,

merit or consideration; & that they were ‘purchasable

& transferable like any stock on Wall Street’.

*

• ee continues recalling the US science of political manipulation and corruption thru Gustavus Myer’s history of the Tammany Society. Myers take on capitalism is, however, primitive – like our famed aragalists – for he doesn’t place the ‘corruption’ being upheld by the hourly exploitation of labour, or the private capture of public goods aided by the state – a private-public partnership indeed is what it’s all about, no doubt.

     A ‘charitable & benevolent corporation’ it was, by law, but Tammany was in reality, a secretive political machine run to benefit the banks & their businesses, industries & railroads, etc. They learned the political art of deploying petty criminals, ‘boisterous roughs of the river edge’, immigrants, industrious mechanics & laborers, & businessmen, so they could enjoy the ‘spoils’ of office, the disbursement of municipal finances, the selection to minor state offices. Tammany adopted the ‘convention system of nominating’, to control the election of delegates to conventions, and to eliminate ‘the risk of having prearranged nominations overruled by an influx of gangs‘ at large popular meetings. Under the guise of pro- & anti-slavery, under the guise of imperialism, one faction opposed ‘the extension of slavery to free territory’, to prevent an influx of Africans, the other promoted the enslaving south. But when threatened by outside forces, they joined together. For there were fortunes to be made, by plundering the city and State. They disdained ‘the conduct of the agents and actual performers in this wholesale brigandage – the lobbyists, Legislators and Aldermen – even as their employers stood before the world as the representatives of virtue and respectability”.’

     The US news media hyped the uncovering of gold in California and Australia creating in all classes a feverish desire for wealth. Vessel after vessel was arriving in the harbor with millions of dollars’ worth of gold dust”. Glowing accounts described how poor men got rich quick: ‘all means of ‘getting ahead’ came to be considered legitimate. Politicians, trafficking in nominations and political influence, found it a most auspicious time.’ With the new wealth pouring in, old trade-unions were rapidly strengthened and new ones formed. They demanded ‘more pay and shorter hours of work. ‘Between the Spring of 1850 & the Spring of 1853 nearly every trade in the city engaged in one or more strikes, with almost invariable success.’ He did not mention how, once the settlers found no fortunes in gold, they turned on and stole the farms of the Chinese who had turned California into an abundant food basket.

     Meanwhile, a million or more immigrants ‘driven by famine and oppression from Ireland, Germany and other European countries’, poured through the port of New York alone, 1847-52. The ‘thrifty and honest’, the ‘ignorant and vicious’ filled the pauper and criminal classes of the metropolis. ‘The sharper-witted among them soon mended their poverty by making a livelihood of politics’. To them political rights meant obtaining money or the receiving jobs from the city, State or national government, in return for delivering voters at the polls. The political lawbreaker was immune from punishment, as Aldermen sat as Justices in the Mayor’s Court, The police were appointed by politicians exclusively on political grounds. The policeman’s livelihood depended on gaining money or receiving jobs under the city, State or national government, in return for the marshaling of voters at the polls. ‘They bothered little, and knew less’ about the issues involved (see ee Focus).

*

• The merchant media appears to be slowly but inexorably turning on the NPP-JVP government whose path they greased to power. All the crimes of the past and the present will now be dumped on their heads, just as it was dumped on skulls previous. It is now their turn. It’s just a matter of time. The merchant media’s purpose is to undermine the popular support for socialist and nationalist forces that have dominated the Sri Lankan polity (see Republic in ee Focus, on the polls regarding attitudes towards socialism).

Those who have been elected promising to be clean, will soon find out that it is only the dominant merchant system that can afford them the cash & contracts to keep their sympathizers loyal; allow them to run again & again and win, so as not to be accused of being corrupt and being jailed themselves, by selectively providing them the ‘sunlight’ to be clean, in the media at least. Then there are those who claim that it is only politicians of the past who have been corrupt, and if such corruption persists, they resort to citing the secular version of the Christian axiom of original sin: that people are primordially bad by nature. All we can say is, the future will soon take care of us all… for better and for worse.

Bus accidents are blamed on drivers, rather than how the banks have choreographed these disasters; ragging is blamed on the venality of rural rubes, rather than on the role of the education system in reproducing the class structure shaped by a merchant economy; and the closure of factories, is blamed on boisterous workers and wild unions, but not on the strategies of multinational corporations seeking ‘labor arbitrage’ (the lowest wage costs) around the world.

The problem with talking so narrowly about this corruption business, of course, is that the merchant media utters not a word about how the private sector monopolizes the public resources of the country, and refuses to employ people with dignity. Nor will their sponsors allow any talk about how this corruption is built on the true original sin: the private appropriation of the social surplus via the exploitation of workers, inherent to capitalism itself, which is mother, father, grandpa, grandpa of all such crimes.

*

_________

Contents:

How the English Still Prevent Modern Industrial Education in Sri Lanka